Definitions for hortatory

urging to some course of conduct or action; exhorting; encouraging: a hortatory speech.

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Citations for hortatory

Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject.Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

For the rest of August, and all fall, this urgent, hortatory book ran my life. I tried to follow its schedules: every day, sixty-five gesture drawings, fifteen memory drawings, an hour-long contour drawing, and “The Sustained Study in Crayon, Clothed” or “The Sustained Study in Crayon, Nude.”Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, 1987